Re:Why I like Java
by beagle3 on Friday March 28, 2014 @03:47AM
(#7485847)
> one of those "I know it when I see it" things.
Which is a confusing use of the term "expression", since it is very well defined when talking about languages - in fact, most formal grammars have a nonterminal called "expr" or "expression" when describing the language.
Your description, though, more closely correlates with what most languages consider a statement.
Regardless, it's just pure statistics - if you calculate it, you'll notice that you have e.g. 1.3 expressions per line, with a standard deviation of 1 expressions per line - which means that over 1000 lines, you'll have, with 95% confidence, 1200-1400 expressions -- it wouldn't matter if you measure LOC or "expressions".
> What confuses me is that you appear to be claiming that fewer LOC should correlate strongly with fewer bugs, but then go on to say that terser is not automatically better (in this context (sic?)). Maybe I'm reading more into it than you intend, but I'm left a bit confused.
What I'm claiming is that, when people actually measured this, they found out that a given programmer tends to have a nearly constant number of bugs per line, regardless of language - that is, person X tends to have (on average) one bug per 100 lines, whether those lines are C, Fortran or Basic - the variance per programmer is way larger than the variance of that programmer per language.
Now, PeopleWare which references those studies (where I read about that) was written 20 years ago or so - so the Java or C++ considered wasn't today's Java/C++, things like Scala and Ruby were not considered. However, I'd be surprised if they significantly change the results - because those studies DID include Lisp, which -- even 20 years ago -- had everything to offer that you can get from Scala today.
So, in a sense - yes, you should write terse programs, regardless of which language you do that in. If you wrote assembly code using Scala syntax, and compiled with a Scala compiler - Scala is not helping you one bit.
Which is a confusing use of the term "expression", since it is very well defined when talking about languages - in fact, most formal grammars have a nonterminal called "expr" or "expression" when describing the language.
Your description, though, more closely correlates with what most languages consider a statement.
Regardless, it's just pure statistics - if you calculate it, you'll notice that you have e.g. 1.3 expressions per line, with a standard deviation of 1 expressions per line - which means that over 1000 lines, you'll have, with 95% confidence, 1200-1400 expressions -- it wouldn't matter if you measure LOC or "expressions".
> What confuses me is that you appear to be claiming that fewer LOC should correlate strongly with fewer bugs, but then go on to say that terser is not automatically better (in this context (sic?)). Maybe I'm reading more into it than you intend, but I'm left a bit confused.
What I'm claiming is that, when people actually measured this, they found out that a given programmer tends to have a nearly constant number of bugs per line, regardless of language - that is, person X tends to have (on average) one bug per 100 lines, whether those lines are C, Fortran or Basic - the variance per programmer is way larger than the variance of that programmer per language.
Now, PeopleWare which references those studies (where I read about that) was written 20 years ago or so - so the Java or C++ considered wasn't today's Java/C++, things like Scala and Ruby were not considered. However, I'd be surprised if they significantly change the results - because those studies DID include Lisp, which -- even 20 years ago -- had everything to offer that you can get from Scala today.
So, in a sense - yes, you should write terse programs, regardless of which language you do that in. If you wrote assembly code using Scala syntax, and compiled with a Scala compiler - Scala is not helping you one bit.